Has anybody Heard of Bing Cashback?

[pmaior]

Something interesting I found in a google search. I saw a ppc ad by bing cashback.

Never heard of it so I checked it out. It is a comparison engine type format where vendors can offer rebates.

Don't see a way to use it for affiliate offers beccause they say you have to be able to ship directly. But it may worth looking into.

Does anyone know anything about this program ? http://advertising.microsoft.com/adv.../bing-cashback

[jkgourmet]

My first impression (though not a deep read) is a slight concern that this might cause an affiliate to lose commissions.

Let me give an example. I'm shopping for widgets on the internet, so I use whichever search engine to find the widgets I'm looking for. Normally, I'd click through on what might (probably)is an affialite site and the affilaite gets paid, right.

Bing Cashback could change that ending two ways:

1. If I used Bing when I did my search for the widgets, I might very well see that little PPC ad for cashback and use that to find my widgets rather than anything that turned up in the organic search from Bing. It's like a sale sign in one widget store, when the other one doesn't have the sale (or at least, I don't know it has a sale, since there's no sign on the door, and I didn't go inside).

2. If I'm a savvy shopper, I'm going to get used to seeing those Bing Cashback things all over the net. Before I place my order at the first site I found organically (the supposed affiliate site), I'm going to click away, pop Bing cashback for widgets in the search engine, and see if I can get a little cash back courtesy of microsoft. Affiliate loses again.

But truthfully, I can't see making a big deal out of it. It is what it is. Seems to me there was something called ebates a few years ago like this. Where did that go?

[pmaior]

Good points Jeanette. I was thinking more along the lines of leveraging the tool for affiliate purposes and didn't see an in.

But you just gave me a thought. If you are an affiliate of a vendor that is a member. You could get them to your site and get them to set the cookie for your affiliate link then if they go off to cashback you should still get credit.

It's a stretch, and I don't know if it would work but worth consideration.

Another way may be if they do an adsense type arangement for putting the Cashback logo on your site. Wouldn't want to send visitors away, but if they are leaving anyway, why not..

I think Microsoft announced this in August, so I think you may be right about it's future.

Pablo

[jkgourmet]

Good points Jeanette. I was thinking more along the lines of leveraging the tool for affiliate purposes and didn't see an in.

But you just gave me a thought. If you are an affiliate of a vendor that is a member. You could get them to your site and get them to set the cookie for your affiliate link then if they go off to cashback you should still get credit.

Pablo

I'm still a little lost on this entire thing but I don't think you're correct. Last one there gets the cookie. If they go to cashback to get the coupon, I'm thinking your cookie is gone. That's the way it worked with ebate, I think.

[pmaior]

You are right, the last "Affiliate" cookie gets the credit. The Vendor does not usually override a cookie set by an affiliate. At least that is the way I understand it. Some probably do, but it would not be good affiliate relations to do something like that. A good question for the Affiliate manager.

I have this issue right now. I want to put the vendors videos on my site, but guess what, they post their website on the video. So if viewers get inspired by the video and type in the URL, No credit for me.

Pablo